Enterprises frequently overspend on software applications for their workforces. Enterprise applications continue to increase in popularity, showing a steep increase in development in recent years. Enterprises expend substantial capital—sometimes millions of dollars—to develop, license, or purchase these applications. Despite their expenditures, these enterprises typically lack any meaningful information regarding an application's usage. This lack of information leads to various inefficiencies, such as purchasing licenses to use the application for employees that never actually use the application. For large-scale enterprises, these inefficiencies multiply as more applications are developed or purchased over time.
A core source of inefficiency is the lack of data regarding application usage. Usage metrics for publicly available applications are often only available to the developer. The enterprise might be forced to pay a third-party for this information. Metrics for internal and web-based applications can be even more difficult to ascertain. Internal applications are typically distributed through an Enterprise Mobility Management (“EMM”) system, while web-based applications provide an application-based gateway to a website, but both types of application fail to provide meaningful metrics. Without these metrics, an enterprise lacks the tools to optimize their application deployment to employees.
Third-party solutions offer a potential option for an enterprise that desires application metrics for an internal application. However, these solutions carry various drawbacks. For example, they require additional coding within each application, increasing the complexity and development time for applications. Another substantial drawback is the cost of utilizing a third-party solution for every application as it is developed. If these third-party solutions differ between applications within an enterprise, then the enterprise might receive data in varying formats. Finally, the third-party solutions fail to provide optimization strategies across multiple applications, leaving the enterprise with lots of data but no actionable strategy for optimization.
As a result, a need exists for a system that can analyze application usage—including internal-application and web-application usage—on a user device, as well as determine optimization strategies to save money for the enterprise.